For those interested, I took a look at why the search on RubyGarden's wiki is so slow. It looks like the search opens each file and does a regex match, so with the almost 1200 Wiki nodes we now have, it's not a big surprise that it would be slow. I'll try to take a stab at a faster search this weekend if time permits, though it's written in Perl so I might get demotivated pretty quickly. :)
Chad